Easy on the Eyes
Tieflings are weird. Seriously, just look at all the different flavors they can come in. I don’t know where exactly Thief gets her Abyssal heritage, but I’m guessing it’s from the neighborhood of the Demonweb Pits.
Any dang way, this is one of those comics that’s been sitting in the back of my head for a while. I knew that there was something creepy behind our girl’s bangs, but I just couldn’t decide how to make the big reveal. In the same way I had a tough time figuring out what would make Barbarian angry, I couldn’t come up with a reason for Thief to reveal her eye weirdness. For a long time I toyed with “Thief gets so angry that her demon-eyes begin glowing,” but she’s such a composed character that nothing seemed to fit. It was only this week, talking over an upcoming game with a buddy, when I realized I was taking the wrong angle.
“I want my guy to have this hidden agenda,” he said. “His motivations are in conflict with the rest of the party’s, but I’m worried it’s going to turn into this big obnoxious secret.”
You guys have already heard my spiel on Cloak & Dagger PVP vs. Metagame PVP, so I won’t bore you with it here. In making the point, however, I related the story of my youthful indiscretions as a goblin cabin boy. One of the players in that campaign was a werewolf, and she told us ahead of time how it was this big secret for the character. Being an obnoxious goblin rogue, I took this as a challenge. First scene of the first session, when we “hear some weird howling coming from below decks,” my immediate response is to investigate. My character had an absurdly high Move Silently skill for 1st level, so of course I figured out what was going on. The goblin blabbed, the fur flew, and so the “secret werewolf” storyline was quashed before we broke for lunch. Needless to say, my lycanthropic pal was not happy.
I’ve since learned my lesson. If your party has a PC with a big-deal secret, maybe let them sit on it for a few levels. Enjoy some dramatic irony. Don’t unmask the werewolf.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you seen a big secret spoiled in a game? What was the fallout like?
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I mean, look at the positives, Wizard! At least she’s not Kyton-blooded. Going to bed with a part-Cenobite doesn’t seem like a very good idea. And think about this sweet, sweet racial bonus to Perception from having more than one pair of eyes! (I don’t know if you intended this, or is it just an act of accident brilliance, but after I checked it turned out that in PF Demon-blooded tieflings do, in fact, get a racial bonus to Perception. )
For me, the interesting unintended thing was this:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/family-ties
Now that’s something I might play with in the future. Are Thief and Sorcerer cousins?
Was this why Sorcerer and Wizard were dueling? An extended family version of “how dare you touch my sister”?
That was my first thought, yeah. 🙂
So what does she look like with them all the way open? Or is that the secret into which it is best not to pry?
Hey, I didn’t know what they looked like until Laurel drew ’em. I just said “spider-like” in the script.
In a very weird game of Skulls and Shackles (most of the party was at least Good-Leaning, and the Captain wanted nothing to do with piracy) once I swapped out a character that had almost died a dozen times for a Summoner that was intended to hide the fact that he was a devotee of Dagon, Demon Lord of Sea Monsters. The problem is I am horrible at CE, and worse at Subtlety, so I think it took less than a week-in game before the secret got out. He promptly got driven off the ship, and I was re-rolling again. That said, if the game hadn’t fallen apart shortly afterwards (bad case of main-character-itis with the Captain that wanted nothing to do with it, running into her now-a-pirate younger brother broke her beyond fixing and ruined the GM’s re-written plot) the GM had intended to bring him back as a stronger possibly-recurring villain after that.
You can accept that your brother is a pirate and a good man or you can’t. But pirating is in this module, Captain, so you’ll have to square with that some day.
Evil aligned PCs are so hard to pull off. Everyone has a different idea about what evil means, and for every “we can work together for a specific goal” party member there’s a “smite on sight” guy as well.
Yeah, if it was just pirating that probably wouldn’t be *that* bad, but then the GM took the fact that she was a witch, and the patron thing there-in (Peace IIRC, but the patron had a weird interpretation of peace,) and ran with it. So not only is she forced into a life of piracy when she didn’t want to be a pirate, and not only is she now *leader* of a band of pirates when she never wanted it in the first place, but now she’s also the tool for some higher power pushing her to use the band of pirates to save the world and it wound up too much for a backwater girl’s shoulders. And that’s how the GM learned the main-characteritis is a bad thing.
So pretty!
I mean c’mon Wizard, who are you to judge? You thought it was a good idea to permanently ink a bunch of squiggly lines on your skin. When you were 117. =P
I love tieflings precisely for this reason. You can really have fun with stuff about their appearance. And they’re just alien enough to make me not go “so it’s a human but with one extra feature painted on?” But also not so alien that you wind up in a very weird place when you consider their home design.
As far as secrets go… I have the opposite problem. Any time I write in anything not shouting in your face obvious into a character, nobody ever notices it’s there.
“I will have you know that those are runic tattoos. They allow me to control the flow of such arcane power as would leave a lesser being naught but a pile of ash! Furthermore, the fact that my younger, drunker self thought that ‘tribal’ designs were ‘freaking sweet, bro’ has nothing to do with it!”
I had a Wizardly backstory a little while ago where my wizard, in a fit of hubris, inscribed too many squiggly lines on his body and was immediately subject to magic overdraft that just about blew his cells apart individually. Fortunately, someone related to the god of magic noticed and lightly stabbed him a bunch of times to ruin most of the runes.
It wound up being my little in character justification of the Metamagic Specialist feat (in 3.5).
You should always pay for the magic overdraft protection. Assuming of course that your school offers coverage.
Also, “lightly stabbed” sounds like something a rogue says when he’s explaining himself to the watch.
if anything im just happy to finally see what she looks like under her abundant hairs 😛
ABUNDANT HAIRS
School transmutation; Level druid 1, ranger 1, shaman 1; Domain animal (fur) 1
CASTING
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V, S, DF
EFFECT
Range close (25 ft. + 5 ft./level)
Target one creature
Duration 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw Will; Spell Resistance yes
DESCRIPTION
This spell causes the target’s hair to grow until the afflicted creature looks like Cousin It from the freakin’ Adams Family. The target’s hair wraps around adjacent creatures. Creatures that fail their save gain the entangled condition. Creatures that make their save can move as normal, but those that remain adjacent to the afflicted creature must save again at the end of your turn.
Creatures that move adjacent to the target creature must save immediately. Those that fail must end their movement and gain the entangled condition. Entangled creatures can attempt to break free as a move action, making a Strength or Escape Artist check. The DC for this check is equal to the DC of the spell. Affected creatures are tethered to one another, and may attempt a drag combat maneuver to move the big hairy cluster. Such a maneuver uses the afflicted creature’s CMD, along with a –4 penalty for each creature being dragged beyond the first.
In our setting, dragons are elemental. There are more than 20 possible combinations created by layering the main four (earth, air, fire, water) in positive and negative aspects. It is not possible to have a “creation” dragon, defined as all four positive aspects, since opposing elements do not combine in any positive way. But it is possible to have a “void” dragon, and quite easily, with the correct negative oppositions. Dragon pairings that could result in void offspring are taboo, because Void is the ultimate “bad” god in our setting. Perfectly lawful neutral: all things must cease to be.
But half-dragons, especially half-HUMAN half-dragons, don’t generally care about the rules.
So I created a void half-dragon, and spent the first five or six levels of the campaign playing her off as a stone dragon. I thought the party would’ve gotten suspicious when this human-sized person “ate” an entire wall of stone (dragons can and must eat their own element to survive), but nope, nobody questioned where all that mass went.
We had a ten-year in-game break, and a couple off-screen levels for the next part of the campaign. We had to describe what we were doing in the meantime, so I described how I’d founded a city of tolerance, where all elementals and half-dragons could have a home with none of the prejudice and stereotyping that normally came from having an elemental nature. I then described how, five years after the city was founded, I made an epic speech of how proud I was of everyone for their inclusiveness, and for the first time I felt I was somewhere I could safely and openly be the Void dragon I was.
NOBODY saw it coming. It was awesome.
The downside was that I got Void Priest groupies, always getting underfoot clamoring about how awesome it would use my holy Void breath on them and make them cease to be…
Now see, that’s a cool secret. You didn’t work against the party’s interests, and so didn’t have to deal with the cloak and dagger fallout. Well done!
Wizard can always drop some corny joke, like ‘Now I have even more eyes to get lost in.’ or ‘We always see eye to eye. To eye to eye. To eye to eye.’
“Honestly my sweet, I prefer the bangs. If anything they should be longer.” >_>
Heh. I literally just made (not quite twenty four hours ago) a Aasimar Magus who is as evil as they come. But since she’s a fourth level character (with 6000 starting gold) she can afford a Hat of Disguise and Angelskin clothing, making this
https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/monstergirlencyclopedia/images/6/69/261_darkvalkyrie_L.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140505171046
look like this
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/monstergirlencyclopedia/images/c/c5/260_valkyrie.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140524063439
and not detecting as evil.
Two questions.
1. Will the rest of the players know about this secret, or will you let it come up through play?
2. Was that (awesome) art made for this character, or are your re-purposing something?
I played a female monk who hid her gender simply to avoid prejudice in a male-oriented society. The DM claimed that this kind of thing wasn’t necessary in HIS world, then proceeded to prove himself wrong at every turn. Eventually he managed to slip her a love potion and forced a reveal.
At a later date, this DM maneuvered her into a “challenge” from a higher-ranked monk (based upon a false trespassing claim) and invoked a made-up rule that both contestants must battle nude. The one actual female gamer in our group about lost her shit. I just calmly rolled one crit after another and wiped the floor with his NPC.
Man… I feel like that’s the worst way to handle it. Claim it’s not an issue then make it an issue. Like I said over here…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/gender-roles
…It behooves a GM to confront gender / racial / etc. dynamics head on rather than deny they exist. And for crap’s sake, if a player comes up to you and says that this is a major theme for her character, maybe incorporate that note into your world, ya know?
A female monk I played in an investigation-heavy campaign was a monk from an order of secret bodyguards who often masqueraded as servants and were meant to protect their charges without being recognized as bodyguards. She was a shy-seeming slight young woman with great bonuses to bluff and disguise. She had been hired by the family of the party’s Elven Wizard to keep him safe while he was getting his adventuring phase out of his system. There were plenty of moments that probably stretched credibility, and most of the party figured it out pretty quickly, but the Wizard’s player kept up roleplaying a total obliviousness to the apparent miraculous escapes and attackers suddenly stunning-fisted by his humble servant. We never got to do a full reveal of her purpose as the campaign petered out, but it was fun in the mean-time.
In my current game, I’m playing a Changeling Barbarian. In Pathfinder Changelings are the daughters of Hags, brought up by mortal parents and eventually called to their mothers’ covens to be transformed into a new Hag. She was called, but before the ritual could be performed the coven was attacked by demons in the service of Lamashtu, and in a moment of cruel whimsy, the head demon carved the symbol of Lamashtu, the Mother of Monsters into her face. She bears the scar, and a mark from Lamashtu carries with it the curse of rage that gives her her Barbarian-ness. The mark is obscured by scar tissue when she isn’t raging, but when she is, it becomes visible and all her rage powers are selected to make her look more monstrous (Horns, razor-sharp teeth). I roleplay her on the knife-edge of Chaotic Good or Chaotic Evil, being pulled one way by her nature and this demonic taint, and the other by her friends. This ‘secret’ isn’t campaign-essential, or even making her the center of attention, but it’s there for others to take up if they want, and hopefully the GM as well somewhere down the line.
I kinda think the eyes are pretty. Love the color. But I can see how they might freak someone out.
There’s a reason homegirl’s got bangs.
Remember that 7 Intelligence, 7 Charisma, 7 Wisdom character I mentioned previously? I lied: His stats were 20 Strength, 14 Dexterity, 16 Constitution, 7 Intelligence, 9 Wisdom, 5 Charisma because he was an Oni-blood Tiefling. Barbarian with the Abyssal Bloodline and Demonic Totem rage powers.
Roleplay wise, he wasn’t there at all. He was a blank slate unless someone talked to him. “Me name is…. duh… what me name again? Think they said name was Kronk… Kronk good at kill stuff…. Kronk say his name lots, less he forget… What my name again?”
And for the life of me, my GM keeps trying to dominate this poor soul, despite him having a ridiculously high Will saves thanks to items, feats, and rage powers (downside being – I’ll almost never get fully healed by my parties healer because I’m forced to save against ALL magic that comes my way).
“Oh yeah, almost forgot… Kronk kill stuff good!”
So he… had multiple eyes?
Thief actually looks super-pretty with her hair out of her eyes like this…
Some attractive people insist that they look hideous in glasses. Same deal.